St. Patrick's Day Edition

It’s been another happy week in Dhaka.  We went to a local wedding reception, the country has had some momentous events of late, and our girls’ soccer team hosted and won the conference tournament just as the drought ended. 

The wedding reception was our first real cultural experience here in Bangladesh.  The wedding itself was several months ago.  The bridegroom, Shaikat, is one of the tech guys at school.  We think we were invited (not everyone at AISD was) because he has to help us both so much with our computers—we’re so last century. 

Weddings in Bangladesh are frequently a hybrid of Hindu and Islamic traditions.  According to one of our AISD friends, Moslems don’t have a long, drawn out ritual, but the Hindu events can go on for several days.  The wife’s family hosts the wedding and whatever social events they want, then a few months later the husband’s family has a party/reception.  Both families come to both, but each invites friends as well. 

This reception was at a banquet center on the other side of town, but our driver found it, and Shaikat’s father greeted us on the sidewalk.  There were at least 200 people there; he took us inside, and upstairs past everyone else to the front row of sofas right in front of a bench- and flower-covered dais.  Shaikat stopped by to welcome us and let us know that Anika would arrive shortly.  

And then, there she was. 

Anika 

The reception was not so much a gifting and greeting event as a photo-op.  Anika sat on the dais, looking beautiful and perfect while three professional photographers and all the family members with cameras came up to take pictures.  The make-up is a three-hour process itself, we are told; I am not sure how long the henna on the arms and hands took. 

After 45 minutes of photography, we were escorted into the dining hall next door for traditional Bangladeshi buriyani.  We are almost the only ones who required utensils; everyone else ate with their right hands.  As soon as we had eaten, we were encouraged to come back to the photo-op; the tables were cleared and reset for the other 100 or so people.  At that point we were invited to the dais to have our photo taken with the happy couple.  That picture will be available in about a month.

The Happy Couple

The major school news is that AISD won the conference girls’ soccer tournament.  There were five teams—Overseas School Columbo (Sri Lanka), Lincoln School (Nepal), Lahore American School (Pakistan) and the American International Schools of Chennai and Bombay, respectively--here for the event.  We hosted two girls, Sujana and Prahbuti, from Nepal. 

Our team beat the OSC Geckos by one goal in a shoot-out after 90 minutes of regulation and 10 minutes of overtime just as the first storm in months hit.  It had been raining a little during the last minutes of the game, but began to really pour after we got home.  The lightning and thunder were pretty impressive, and there was about 6 inches of water in the street at one time.   

Water, or its lack, has been an issue recently.  Our school has, or had, a deep well that allowed us to have drinking water from water fountains, just like in Europe or America.  The safety and quality were checked regularly by the embassy people, and everything was good.  Then the pump failed.  Actually, a local company pulled the pump and found it to be working fine; there wasn’t any water in the aquifer anymore.  So we now have five-liter barrel-like water containers everywhere. 

Now that we have had a big storm, things may change again.  It's already better here--cleaner air and fewer mosquitos.  

We have also wondered if Bangladesh ever makes the local news back in America. 

For instance, the local opposition party, who sets records for boycotting parliament, called a big rally/protest/demonstration for downtown.  The party in power responded by closing the various means of entering the city—trains, buses and ferries were stopped, vehicles belonging to opposition party members were “confiscated”, armed groups of thugs allied to the party in power assisted the police in beating protesters, and the TV stations were taken off the air.  (Al-Jazeera covered it and our local newspaper kept printing.)

All the excitement took place on the other side of town from us; we were perfectly safe, by the way. 

Our Nepalese soccer players didn't mention the demonstration but asked about the passenger and freight ferry that was struck by an oil barge and sank in a river south of Dhaka killing almost 200 people.  That made the news in Kathmandu as well as here. 

Don't know if you heard about these: 

• The Bangladeshi government won a case in a United Nations court giving it much more of the Bay of Bengal than either India or Myanmar wanted to give up; American oil companies are all excited. India would like to negotiate.   
• Russia just gave Bangladesh a soft loan to build a nuclear reactor here for producing electricity.  They are just waiting on the government to write an energy policy that will insure that it will all be safe.  What could possibly go wrong?  

Meanwhile, the biggest issue here in the diplomatic enclave is that the government has decided that this is a great time to install storm sewers, so streets in the area are littered with 4’ concrete tubes waiting for ditches to be dug.  Consequently, traffic is worse than ever.